


From a Great Height

by clotpoleofthelord (plantainleaf)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Depression, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-10
Updated: 2013-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-11 11:15:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/798090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plantainleaf/pseuds/clotpoleofthelord
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Castiel needs distance.</p><p>For the Week 2 prompt Space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From a Great Height

Sometimes, when the pressures of Earth and Heaven weigh too heavily on him, Castiel soars up into the sky. Sometimes he rises just high enough that the humans below seem like insects, going about their daily business in neat, orderly lines. Sometimes he hovers in the clouds, letting the air's moisture soak his borrowed suit and coat. And sometimes, when he wants to feel as though life is still as simple as it was before he pulled a Righteous Man from Hell, he flies even higher.

He knows he may not be able to do this much longer. His grace is draining from him slowly but steadily, each day away from Heaven marked by something else he cannot do, cannot fix, cannot control. Today it was the stubbly hair growing on his vessel’s chin that had suddenly sprouted after five years of near-smoothness. Tomorrow it might be a need to breathe, or the loss of his soul-sight. But the shift he dreads most of all was the loss of his wings.

That's why today, instead of guarding the Winchesters or the prophet or the tablet or doing any of the things he knows he should, he is here, floating in the wisps of the thermosphere, breathing in the emptiness of space, two hundred miles above the Earth's surface.

Castiel has been around for a very long time. He has watched the Earth heat and cool, be covered in ash and ice and snow and soot. He has watched the network of lights across the surface grow from a handful of campfires sprinkled through the forest to a web of neon and fluorescence covering half the land. He watched the ancestors of modern humans take their first upright steps and he has flown beside them to the moon.

But in all that time, he has never (or has he, and has it been lost to him?) met anyone who made his grace ring with light like Dean Winchester. The glow of his soul was visible through the ash and fire and screams of Hell, and even from hundreds of miles above Castiel can feel him pulsing below.

He shouldn't go to him. Castiel knows this like he knows that he has failed, that he needs penance, that he is broken.

But he will.

He will fly down and stand by Dean's side, undeserving of Dean's loyalty but unwilling to give it up.

And someday, maybe, he will have paid for his sins. Someday, maybe, he will be worthy of Dean's support, and trust, and love.

 


End file.
